Rigoletto set in seedy back streets haunted by mafia hoodlums has been a familiar concept since Jonathan Miller’s iconic 1982 production (often revived) for English National Opera. How well it works is confirmed once more in director Lindsay Posner’s new staging for Opera Holland Park. The elegant facade of Holland House supplies a fitting backdrop for the ducal court, while two revolvable sea containers (designer Tom Scutt) become miniature ‘theatres’ for interior scenes.

Tribute, of a sort, is paid to its distinguished predecessor as a study of ‘mob rule’ in the Act III action at the bar of the assassin Sparafucile (Graeme Broadbent) and his odious sister Maddalena (Patricia Orr). Whereas Miller employed a jukebox to kick off La donna è mobile, Posner has the lusty Duke (Jaewoo Kim) switching on a television by remote control and finding Pavarotti singing this opera’s (all opera’s) most famous aria — and then zapping off the performance with the suggestion that he can make a better fist of it himself.

Such levity supplies momentary relief from the dark and dangerous world into which this thrilling work delivers us.

Rarely have I seen a father’s agony over a wronged daughter more starkly revealed than in the sensational performance of Robert Poulton (pictured above) as the hunchbacked jester, Rigoletto.

Julia Sporsén (pictured, with Jaewoo Kim), meanwhile, starkly reveals the agony of a Gilda gripped in a fatal passion for the feckless Duke. Their amorous Act I encounter, presented in more graphically sexual terms than is usual, shows how swiftly she has fallen into the seedy milieu of the court’s pole- dancing courtesans.

The problem of how, fatally stabbed and in a sack, she still manages to sing her closing three-minute aria with such vigour is (for once) brilliantly solved by Posner.

Under the sure-handed control of conductor Stuart Stratford, the production continues until August 13.

Box office: 0300 999 1000 (www.operahollandpark.com).